Life & Wisdom Quote by May Sarton

Decency, Sarton suggests, is not the low bar we pretend it is. It takes the moral imagination of a hero just to clear the everyday hurdles of being tolerable: telling the truth when lying would be smoother, staying kind when you are tired, refusing the small cruelties that pass for normal conversation. The line works because it flips a comforting hierarchy. We like to reserve “hero” for the exceptional and “decent” for the baseline; Sarton collapses that distinction and exposes how much effort our baseline actually demands.

As a poet, she compresses an entire ethical argument into a clean paradox. “Think like a hero” isn’t about capes or grand gestures. It’s about interior posture: vigilance, self-command, a willingness to be unpopular, the ability to see past your own grievance in the moment it feels most justified. The subtext is quietly accusatory. If being decent requires heroic thinking, then most “ordinary” lapses aren’t harmless quirks; they’re failures of courage disguised as temperament, busyness, or “just being honest.”

Placed in the 20th century’s churn of war, social upheaval, and private disillusionments, the sentence reads like an antidote to cynicism. Not a pep talk - a demand. Sarton’s intent seems less to romanticize virtue than to strip away our excuses for mediocrity. She grants moral seriousness to the smallest choices and implies that the real battlefield is not history’s spotlight, but the daily, unglamorous arena where character is either practiced or surrendered.